


Homesick at Space Camp

by FifteenHundredPaperDragons



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish is also Bad at Feelings, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Space, Astronauts, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Minor Henry Cheng/Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Mutual Pining, Past Child Abuse, Past Relationship(s), Post-Canon, Pynch Week, Pynch Week 2019, Ronan Lynch is Bad at Feelings, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 18:54:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20801315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FifteenHundredPaperDragons/pseuds/FifteenHundredPaperDragons
Summary: Adam spent his whole childhood trying to run away, so he never expected to feel homesick. Ronan is used to causing unexpected emotions.or,the They-never-really-discuss-their-feelings-and-then-Adam-goes-off-to-space AU.Pynch Week 2019, day 5: Space AU





	Homesick at Space Camp

Adam Parrish had always dreamed of space. The walls in the mobile home of his childhood were so thin they were almost translucent, and so Adam, rather than listen to his parents' daily altercations in the next room, would read. When he was about six, he discovered the concept of space in a magazine his neighbor had thrown away. He'd heard of it before, of course, but he'd never imagined the impossibly vast beauty of it all. 

Photographs of colorful, ancient nebulas and massive, swirling galaxies, illustrations of alien worlds seen up-close, snapshots of the latest spacecraft rendered in soft-edged, fake-looking CGI- all of these had become reoccurring motifs in his mind. When he slept he flew between them, traveling closer than anyone else had ever come and faster than anyone else could ever go. 

Sometimes he couldn't go to the tiny science section of his school library and get his hands on a book. On those days he'd sit on the floor of his room, stare out the narrow vinyl windows, and imagine he was preparing for liftoff. Before, the extent of his world had been the dusty trailer park on the edge of Henrietta, but now that he knew it was immeasurably wide, he let himself begin to hope that he could get far away, far from the dead grass and the plastic walls and his father's hands and his mother's averted eyes.

-

The day he first arrived up amongst the cold and the stars, the blues and the blacks of the night sky, when he looked down at Earth and knew he was as far from that trailer park in Virginia as he could ever get: that was the happiest Adam had ever been. The happiest moment of his entire life, years' worth of training come to jaw-dropping fruition, except. Except. Except for a person who was stuck down there on the surface of the Earth. One person who kept nagging at the back of his mind, despite his best efforts. Sort of like a parasite, he thought. Like a tapeworm- but marginally less gross- that had taken up root inside of him and radically altered the status quo. He'd spent his entire childhood, his entire young life, trying to run far away, so he'd never expected to feel homesick. 

-

Whenever he got a chance to call someone back on Earth, Adam usually called Gansey. He didn't phone often, because he was a busy man, but he did get anxious for a change of company from time to time. One could get tired of seeing the same four people every day without fail; the ISS ended up feeling like awfully close quarters after a couple weeks had passed and you were out of the honeymoon phase with the zero-g surroundings. 

He called Gansey because it was a three-for-one: if you were to reach him, Blue was never far behind. And wherever the two of them were, it was likely Henry would make an appearance as well. He didn't call Noah, because Noah was gone. (Sometimes Adam forgot, somewhere in the more absent part of his mind where the routines of ordinary life were stored, and he thought of something to tell Noah before he remembered again.) And he didn't call Ronan, because Ronan was Ronan. Ronan the tapeworm. Ronan, who'd made things complicated. 

This evening-- it didn't look much like evening at the moment, not as he watched the sun rise and spill light across the surface of the world and imagined, as he often did, what it looked like back down on the ground, but the clock read 18:23 so it was evening for certain-- Adam had a little time off from all his botanical duties. The pea plants had solidly taken root, and he was confident he'd managed to rescue the wilty-seeming one. He sometimes wished all his houseplants back on the surface would grow out in the same sprawling, tangled manner as they did up above. He had a little time off, so he decided it was time to place a call.

Gansey picked up on the third ring. "Adam!" he said. "It's everyone's favorite interplanetary Virginian on the line." Whatever he was using to communicate- his iPad, probably- was perched up closer to eye level. He had a spot of flour on his face and appeared to be making cookies. 

"Interplanetary might be a misnomer. And that one astronaut who took the picture with his dogs, the one who went viral, he's also from Virginia," said Adam.

"His name's Leland Melvin and he's my personal hero!" shouted Henry's faint voice. "Sorry, Adam, second most notable astronaut from Virginia," he continued, voice getting nearer to the camera. 

"Best bioengineer, though," added Blue, popping into the bottom half of the frame, and the trifecta was complete. Naturally he was on speakerphone and naturally all three of them were in the same place. 

"So," said Gansey in the tone of voice that indicated he was probably multitasking, "How's space?"

"Space is good!" said Adam. It was at that moment that one of his crewmates drifted past- the physicist, who was from Japan, and with whom he had a bit of a low-level prank war. She heard his comment and laughed as she floated through the space where Adam had been lounging. He shot her a thumbs-up and decided to take the conversation somewhere with a little more privacy. 

"Any breakthroughs?"

"Not yet," said Adam, because of course Gansey had instantly and unwittingly gotten to the root of all his current insecurities.

"But more importantly," jumped in Blue, because of course she could tell when Gansey accidentally hit a nerve better than Gansey himself ever could, "did you manage to save that one plant? The pea plant?"

"It was a potato plant, and yes I did."

"Do you get dessert up there? Like, every day, or every week, or only on special occasions?" asked Henry, whose questions were always unexpected and usually took Adam off guard enough that he actually had to stop and think about them.

"Uh. Yeah, we get dessert. There's... wait, you're a rich kid who's definitely been to a museum gift shop before. Haven't you had astronaut ice cream?"

"I resent that, but it's true, and I have. Dude! Is that the real deal?"

"Sure is."

"Gross."

"You get used to it. Everything tastes strange in space anyway. How's Earth going for all of you?"

"Earth's going well--" started Gansey, but Blue cut him off.

"Earth is NOT 'going well,' excuse you. There was a tornado warning today. It's November! The climate apocalypse is coming, and in twenty years you and your space friends are going to be the only members of the human race left unless the world leaders get their shit together," she half-yelled, then snatched the spoon out of the cookie dough batter and popped into her mouth faster than Gansey could object.

"Hey! We needed that!"

They were so _familiar_, so cozy, so domestic in their little cookie-baking world. Adam had no doubt that Henry was sitting up on the counter somewhere, scrolling through Twitter and smilingly slightly as Blue and Gansey bickered. It was such a homey scene, arriving up to him from half a second in the past. That little half-moment's delay made the whole thing seem so much more distant. So much more unattainable. Adam smiled crookedly and leaned back, waiting for the bickering to stop. 

Gansey moved back into the frame, "_Sorry_ that you had to witness that crime." 

"It's fine," Adam laughed half-heartedly. It was a cute moment. He was just being a philosophical, cynical bastard. "I've seen worse."

"Oh, speaking of which! Ronan's supposed to be here in a couple minutes."

"Yeah, and he oh-so-casually never shuts up about you, so bet he wants to talk!" called Henry. 

"For someone who isn't that talkative, he really never does shut up, does he?" said Adam.

"Uh, tea? I've missed your savage dry wit while you're hanging out in space," responded Henry. Gansey laughed, which meant the observation was true.   
That was interesting. A parasitic relationship was necessarily unrequited. They weren't supposed to be symbiotic. (He'd referred to Ronan as a tapeworm in his internal monologue, and that was the sort of metaphor that stuck around, spinach-in-teeth style.) 

There was some sort of loud noise on their end. Gansey jumped, drying his hands on his towel as he ran to answer the door. Blue tossed Henry a handful of M&Ms in quick succession with the sort of practiced ease that indicated this wasn't the first time they two had stealthily eaten candy out from under Gansey's overbearing nose. Adam gave a little snort of amusement, and decided to take the opportunity to up and move with his laptop from the desk to a more comfortable situation in his bunk. He unfastened the laptop and gave it a gentle push in the direction of his bunk as he hunted for the spare charging dock. 

Ronan came storming into the kitchen, which was the way he typically entered rooms regardless of his mood. Gansey was smiling skeptically at something he had said, and pointed to a spot on the counter where he set down a bottle of milk and what appeared to be a plastic Tupperware container full of eggs. 

"Adam's on the line!" said Henry in a sing-songy voice, gesturing vaguely at the iPad. Adam waved, even though they probably couldn't see the gesture. Ronan passed Gansey a cloth bag full of something and made right for the iPad, raising his fist for Blue to bump on the way over.

"Hey, Parrish. Long time no see."

"Hey, Ronan. A long time indeed."

"What, like a month?"

"I'd say a month and a half?"

"Hmm. Shit. All right."

"I know you're a conscientious objector to modern technology, but you couldn't pick up a FaceTime call from the ISS?"

"Yeah, I don't think my plan does long distance." 

Adam smiled despite himself. They'd gone a month and a half without speaking, but thirty seconds in and they'd slipped from awkward small talk back into their usual banter. For a moment there Adam had been feeling a little tight-chested, wondering if that awkwardness would persist and bleed out all their familiarity into a conversation about the weather."I'm sure you could afford the fee. I'm only 250 miles above you, after all."

"You're right, phone bills to space are no object."

"So why the radio silence?"

Ronan fished in his pocket and held up a slightly odd-looking Nokia flip phone. He grinned like a shark and said, "Just got this sweet new device, but it can't do video calls." 

It looked almost exactly like the phone that Adam's elderly neighbor had always managed to leave on one of the tables out in the trailer park. He choked back a laugh, still trying to feign annoyance. "Well, now that I've finally got you on the line and in the grip of modern technology, I think we've got some catching up to do."

"I'll leave you two lovebirds alone," said Gansey, coming up to pat Ronan's shoulder with a cheeky smile and clumsy wink. 

"Fuck off," said Ronan kindly. He threw a kitchen towel at a snickering Blue. Adam was hit once again with a pang of regret, seeing their easy domesticity. He'd been there for a time, but it had only been a pit stop on his running away. He comforted himself by taking a moment to look over across his bunk and out the window at the Earth shining below. "I mean, so now that Gansey and his own flock of lovebirds have left us the fuck alone, it's time to get frisky."

"Yep, time to get your freak on in the middle of Gansey's kitchen."

"You know me. And I'm sure it's normal for things to get spicy in the ISS."

"Mmm, you like my sexy space bod? I've been doing lots of pull-ups to try to keep the muscular atrophy at bay," he said, biting his lip and wiggling his eyebrows.

Unfortunately for Adam, there was precious little personal space on a 300-foot-long space station, and that was the moment that one of his crewmates came floating into the bunks right past him. It was Gilyov, who was large, Russian, and a mechanical engineer. He just made a gesture of covering his ears and a 'you-do-you' face as he floated past and said, "didn't mean to be interrupting!"

Adam went beet-red. It usually took longer for the blood to get there in zero G, but apparently this was a high-priority physiological function. "Oh god," he said, covering his face in embarrassment and letting the laptop drift off a little ways. Ronan was cackling maniacally on the other end. Maybe he had gotten a little carried away just then. He liked to think he wasn't the sort of person to get caught up and carried away by things too easily, but then again, he was chronically sleep deprived and getting more lonely than he wanted to admit. His crew was fantastic, but there were just seven of them, and the expanse of space felt crushingly vast when it was right outside his window.  
He didn't put any of this in words. Instead, he slipped into the comfortable climes of botany, space work, and fungal pathogenesis. Ronan's eyes started to glaze over a bit somewhere in the middle of his explanation, but he nodded where appropriate (well, a little bit after the fact) and he hadn't just hung up yet, which was good. 

Adam finished his explanation of his recent work and his plant-related frustrations, and Ronan seamlessly slipped into talking about the ridiculous things Gansey was up to and what was going on at the barns. 

"Opal ate one of my socks the other day. _One_ of my fucking socks! Just one!"

"How thoughtful," murmured Adam in response. He was listening, sort of; mostly, he was letting Ronan's familiar voice and the equally familiar shapes of the names of people and places from home wash over him. He was relaxed. He might have been inclined to doze. 

"She misses you," said Ronan. 

"Hmm?" said Adam. He was awake now, but trying not to say anything to spook Ronan like a wild animal. 

"Nothing," said Ronan. "Sorry, you're drifting off. Could see you falling asleep on the other end. Sorry for being so fucking boring!" he smiled sharply. 

"Oh, no, I wasn't--"

"I mean, you're--"

"Yeah, it's okay, I should get going--"

"Of course. As much fun as it is to be a huge pain in your ass and tell you all about my farm _back on earth,_ I'll leave you be. Bye."

"All right. Bye, Ronan. And, uh, please don't--"

Ronan ended the call. It seemed like a cardinal sin of manners to hang up on the ISS, somehow, but then again this was Ronan Lynch. Adam sighed, and it seem like the sigh hung there in perfect zero-G suspension like an annoying, nagging rain cloud. 

**Author's Note:**

> the title is an old fall out boy song title because i love naming fics like i'm writing on myspace in 2006, and also because it's a god-tier song title (enough that i came up with a whole fic based on it)


End file.
